When Brian leaves I say, “Gracie? Sweetie?” She doesn’t look away from the screen. “Can you hear me, love?” She nods slightly. “Good things are happening, lovey. You are getting Gabey’s blood, and it’s going to cure you.” I am lying beside her in the bed. She rests her head against my shoulder. Brian doesn’t like it when I superimpose my adult anxieties on her child’s reality. Let her watch her video, he’d say. Let her have this experience as a three-year-old. But I want her to hold on to this idea: she will be cured.
Brian arrives with sherbet, and with graham crackers for Gabe. My mom returns with pulled pork sandwiches for everyone, including Bobbie, who drifts in and out, monitoring Gracie’s vital signs. We eat lunch while Gabe’s blood drips into Gracie’s veins slowly. The nursing notes for change of shift read “no distress signals.”
After lunch, Gracie falls asleep in her typical pose—head tossed back, as if listening hard for the answer to a question. Her chin pointed toward the ceiling, her neck arched into a sharp C-curve, body limp, eyelids twitching in time with her dreams.
When she wakes, she wants to watch another movie. Brian goes to the family room for a selection of videos; he presses DVDs, one by one, against the glass, from outside her room, so she can give each movie a thumbs-up or thumbs-down. This becomes a new game. He could just as easily walk into the room and ask, but the silent ritual thrills her.
When the bag is nearly empty, Brian notices that the room has begun to smell strange. “Is that from the sandwiches?” he asks, wrinkling his vegetarian nose. I sniff around, trying to find the source, and keep coming back to the girl herself. I lift her arm, sniff. Smell the back of her neck, under her chin. It’s her. A sickly sweet scent, like candy left too long in a hot car.
Waking up to find me sniffing at her, Gracie asks, “Am I the smelly part?”
I walk down to the nurses’ station. How to phrase this? “Um, why does my daughter smell like decomposing candy corn?”
The nurse is cheerful. “Oh, you mean the creamed corn smell?”
“Do I mean the creamed corn smell?”
“All the kids smell like that when they get their new cells. It’s the preservative the cells are packed in, DMSO; it’s used in canned vegetables.”
“OK,” I say. “Thanks?”
When every drop of fluid is drained, Bobbie unhooks the empty bag and tosses it into the bio waste receptacle out in the hall. Gracie is now sleeping facedown, with two pillows under her stomach so that she forms a little hillock in the bed. My mom gets ready to take Gabe home and put him to sleep.
At the door I lean down to hold Gabe. “I love you,” I say, and kiss his head.
He looks at me, panicky; he’s come to associate “I love you” with me leaving or with being taken away. For him, every kiss is a good-bye kiss.
“No leaving,” he cries, “no leaving.”
“Gabey, love,” I say, “I’ll see you tomorrow.” But Gabe has no solid concept of time. Tomorrow might as well be the year 2050. All he knows is that he’s once again being whisked offstage before the play’s climactic end.
My mom picks him up. “Gabe, I have a plan,” she says.
“What, Didi?” Gabe looks at her, sensing there’s a treat in store, maybe ice cream. Maybe cows, which he newly loves.
As they walk past the nurses’ station, Gabe waves to each nurse, mayoring it up. Two of them stand up to see if he’s got the bee boots on. He does. They blow him kisses that he catches. In a sealed ward of half-broken bodies, his exuberance, his shiny health, his unpained giggle is a form of nutrition we all devour.
The transplant is complete.
Brian and I stay up watching stupid television. We are too washed out for talk, for food, for anything. We’ve done nothing but sit all day; we are exhausted by our inertia, our inability to affect how things turn out. Exhausted by the strain of projecting calm optimism. Exhausted by avoiding each other. If we look closely at the other, we’ll see our own fear. I should go sit with him in the sleeper chair, but I stay where I am.
I can’t manage even the mildest intimacy, and Brian seems to feel the same. I lift Gracie’s hair off her forehead, blow to cool her down, and close my eyes. They chase! No other girl would say precisely this. I hope this means our world can’t do without her.
Her body relaxes against mine. Her breathing grows deep and regular.
Once the stem cells enter the bloodstream, they are self-aware. They know they are stem cells. They survey the body, perceive where they are most needed, and collectively, as a flock of birds bends and turns, they go there. I find the intelligence embedded into cellular biology, at the microscopic level, so touching. En masse they bore out of the vein wall, burrow through muscle, through fascia and bone, to reach their destination. They do this of their own accord. Without any medical inducement or coercion.
They do this just to be nice.
DAY 1
This is the first day; time begins now. As if she were brand-new. In a way, she is.
There is no going back. She’s had the drugs that will change the rate at which her cells replicate, turn her bald, and sick, ripple her nail beds, compromise her liver function, and cause the lining of her entire digestive track—mouth to bum—to slough off. Drugs that will seep into the quietest pockets of her body. Every part of her is littered with toxins; there is no way to create a no-fly zone. Even the recess where her eggs are stored—her future, her potential little people—is awash in the chemo tide. No way to protect them. It took nine months to grow her and only a few minutes to meddle with her future.
At the same time, we’ve obliterated what was malfunctioning. Her defective marrow is razed. She is between bone marrows. And now she must grow new marrow. We have no guarantee that this will happen.
In every other kind of transplant, you take out an organ and put in a new one. You aren’t biting your nails waiting for a new heart to grow back, or a new set of lungs to show up. But that’s just what you do with bone marrow: you wipe out the old and pray that the new appears. Because without bone marrow, which produces red cells, platelets, and white cells, you are nowheresville. For a while, medicine can pinch-hit. But only for a short time. Ultimately, engraftment is everything.
When we signed up for this, it was explained with charts and graphs, in blocks of time, with numbered days. The doctors had said, “We will ablate her marrow, transplant the donor cells, and then she’ll engraft.” And we’d nodded our heads, as if affirming an itinerary in which every connection would be made, on time and without drama. Taxi to train to boat to plane to car to home. I never considered that we might stall out, alone in a strange city, where the trains refuse to run.
There are a million tiny trap doors: she can fail to engraft; the liver can falter or sputter to a stop; a virus or germ can invade her. I am vigilant, hyperalert. If I relax for a minute, a sliver of a second, the black dog might trot down the hall, rest against our door.
DAY 2
She’s still eating, which everyone told us not to expect. She’s hungry, even though the drugs act like Drano poured through the digestive tract, causing everything from mouth sores to stomach ulcers to sores on the bum. But she still wants Doritos.
DAY 3
She’s hurting. It came on last night.
She kept waking up, clutching her knees against her stomach, as if she was trying to squeeze the pain out of herself. Or squeeze herself out of the pain.